Hugely impressed by Ava Bahari here. She is truly a storyteller. There is untold generosity and cleanness to the playing and the best way I can express what sets apart her reading of this oft-performed piece is…

Two mythical birds – the one immortalised by Villa-Lobos – Uirapuru – an endangered species in our musical universe. All kudos to Dudamel for realising the songful connections with it and Stravinsky’s Firebird and rejoicing in them…

This wonderful score is such a good fit for Dudamel’s sleek Los Angeleans. There is what I would call a tinge of Americana about Prokofiev’s big lyric melodies in this of all his pieces and within a…

There have been a couple of stand-out recordings of Mahler’s ‘rogue’ Seventh in recent times – none more illuminating or hard to beat than Rattle’s Bavarian RSO account – but after Paavo Järvi’s brilliant rendering of the…

Shostakovich’s two cello concertos plainly share the same musical DNA – but it’s almost as if the Second (which I am delighted to see becoming more and more core repertoire and a work of choice among leading…

I do believe this is one of the best – perhaps even the best – account of Mahler’s precocious First Symphony that I’ve heard on disc since the celebrated Bernstein/Concertgebouw version. Paavo Järvi and his Zurich orchestra…

A whiplash Scapino, ducking and diving with impunity, sets the tone of this marvellous disc. As so often with John Wilson’s work it’s the precision, the clarity, and the keenest articulation that defines it. The level of…

The great practitioners of Broadway and Hollywood – composers, arrangers, orchestrators – spawned catalogues of what might be considered more ‘legitimate’ music that the world rarely saw or heard. Broadway’s ‘Music Man’ Meredith Wilson’s symphonies, Hitchcock’s Bernard…